In which a veteran of cultural studies seminars in the 1990's moves into academic administration and finds himself a married suburban father of two. Foucault, plus lawn care. Comments are welcome. Comments for general readership can be posted directly after the blog entry. For private comments, I can be reached at deandad at gmail dot com. The opinions expressed here are my own (or those of commenters), and not those of my (unnamed) employer.

Monday, August 08, 2005

Office Space

A rural correspondent, himself a department chair, wrote to complain about faculty who retire, but refuse to move out of their offices. It's creating a real problem for the new faculty who are trying to move in.

That hasn’t been much of a problem here, since retirements have been few and replacements fewer, but I’ve seen it elsewhere. (At my previous school, as the tech boom approached its peak and the school’s rate of growth went from heady to insane, office space shortages very nearly sparked a unionization drive among the faculty. Since then, massive layoffs have, at least, solved the space shortage quite effectively. For the few employees who remain, there may not be job security, but there’s elbow room a-plenty.) Once faculty set up base camp, they won’t be dislodged by anything less than natural disaster (or layoffs).

I don’t know of any other profession in which this would even be tolerated. Can you imagine trying to pull that kind of territorial crap at a bank? A hospital? A marketing agency? Puh-leeze.

The psychology behind it is the interesting part. If a professor has thrown in the towel, why won’t he leave the ring? What’s left to do?

I can understand the desire to have a refuge from the house, but I don’t know why that should be at the college’s expense. Use Starbucks, like the rest of us. And most retired faculty that I know of retain college library privileges.

Granted, faculty offices often accumulate tremendous amounts of paper (occupational hazard), and I agree that the ‘get-out-in-twenty-minutes’ corporate approach would be excessive. But it seems to me that there’s no office so ridiculous that, with a little help, it couldn’t be cleared out in a week or two.

On a space-crunched campus, this can be a real issue. New faculty want to move in with enough lead time to do their jobs, and rightly so. From an institutional perspective, this makes sense; office space is provided specifically and solely to help faculty who work there do the job of the institution. That’s not to say that people won’t do other things, too, but those other things are ancillary. The point is to further the mission of the institution. A retired professor jealously guarding his former office (shrine? crypt? memorial?) does nothing to further the mission of the institution.

I say, pay a few strong-backed grad students 20 bucks an hour and move the stuff out. And deduct the grad students’ pay from the retiree’s check.

Ugh! I cannot imagine even wanting to remain in my office after retirement - okay, that's probably because my 'office' is a grey fabric cube, but still. I never would have guessed that would be a problem, but having seen enough academic politics through my husband's perspective, it doesn't really shock me.

I have a hard time imagining any of the institutions I've been at allowing retired faculty to occupy their old offices gratis or simply because they refuse to leave. I've known a number of retired faculty who, effectively, continued to work, picking up classes, advising students, organizing special programs, and those faculty often got to keep their offices. Research institutions will grant office space to faculty who have retired from teaching, but continue to work on major projects. In those cases, I suspect that the university wants the prestige of the research to reflect back on the institution. Emeritus faculty may be given office space for similar reasons.

There's a reasonable argument to be had over whether retired faculty who pick up a course here and a course there really need to have their own office, especially where space is scarce. And I sympathize with deans and chairs who are pressed to find room for teaching faculty, but can't use an office because it's reserved for a famous researcher who pops in once in a blue moon to get some work done. However, I doubt that there are many places where retired faculty can just dig in and hold onto their offices unless they're at least perceived as providing something of value to the institution.

Wow, I'd never heard of this nonsense. And yes, when one does finally make the decision to retire (since no one is forced to, esp in academia) then why would one want to keep one's office? This seems ridiculous to me.

I say give the person a notice and after a specified amount of time, hire folks to box it all up and mail/deliver it to the person, including a bill for all packing/mailing services.